Scenes of prison life in the south

Visitors should be warned that several of the words, descriptions, and images from Harper's Weekly are considered racially offensive by today's standards. The materials are presented in order to give a true historical picture of the leading 19th-century newspaper's view of black Americans.

During days of slavery there was comparatively little crime. The easy-go lucky nature of the uneducated and poorer whites was not ambitious enough to be criminal. The better educated were too well-bred to stoop to criminal life ; and for the colored criminals the masters acted as court, judge, jury, and executioner. There was no well-developed idea of meum and tuum in the negro's brain, and if he sometimes inverted the possessive adjectives he met his punishment in the stroke of the overseer's lash. If he were guilty of murder he might have to forfeit his life, and the State-some of them, at least-made good his loss to his master from the public treasury. Here and there a calaboose, and now and then a jail, comprised the chief provisions for criminals under the law, and State penitentiaries were almost unknown. Tennessee was an exception to this. One of the earliest and best States-prisons of the South was erected there in 1828 and, largely inspired by a visit from Dorothea Dix-whose portrait, given by herself to Nashville, is one of its most prized possessions-the criminal law was made broad and pogressive, and the treatment of convicts humane and wise, as compared with other places in the South. Suddenly this stricken land finds six millions of people thrown upon it, of whom hundreds and thousands are soon culprits under the law. What should be done with them, without buildings to receive and house them? The States were at first almost palsied by the situation. When the proposition came to lease the convict labor it was regarded as the best and wisest thing under the circumstances. Here, again, the provisions made by Tennessee were intended to be humane. The first lease kept State control over all the prisoners. No hand could be raised against them without the permission of her authorities. Every prisoner who was adjudged guilty of the infraction of rules of the lessees, and so deserving of punishment, had first to be examined by the State officials, and could be punished only by their permission. Other States had somewhat similar provisions, though it is safe to say they were not always carried out to the letter. Tennessee has a little less than fifteen hundred convicts, and Alabama as many more, the great majority of whom are blacks. In the "black belt" of Alabama there are portions of country where there are three negroes to one white person. Among 1144 convicts in one mining camp there were ten times as many blacks as whites, and of the blacks 885 could neither read nor write. In Alabama schools have been established in one or two of the convict camps. Though still in a crude state, and but meagrely attended, they are the first ray of light that has dawned on the mental and spiritual darkness. Female convicts in the South are treated in various ways. As a rule they are not sent to convict camps, but are kept within the walls of the penitentiary, where they do sewing and laundry-work, or sometimes take part in the industries of the prison, as in one where they paint the wheels to the wagons that are made to the number of sixty a day. In the Gulf States, where the women are almost without exception black, they are worked in the cotton field. In Alabama last summer they made three hundred bales of cotton an employment to which they were accustomed, and which keeps them in better health than when shut up all the time within four walls. Convicts within the penitentiaries have the benefit of Sunday-schools and religious services, which are denied to those at the mines. There is a third class of convicts, those leased not to great corporations which for their own reputation must treat the men with decency, but to planters and small manufacturers. These go out in squads of from seventy to a hundred, according to the laws of the different States, and sometimes in smaller numbers, where they are at the mercy of their masters. Of these the world knows little, but the stories of wrong and cruelty, of death and violence, that are occasionally bruited abroad from these isolated places convince one that the State that permits this usage is yielding to another the responsibility which she should hold in her own strong hand. The excuse of poverty can no longer hold. A new South has risen from the ashes of the old, and in her prosperity she should not forget the least of her children. The inmates of prisons should be secured within high and strong walls, to remove all chance and incentive to escape, and then they should be worked for their own good, by way of teaching them steady habits of industry and learning how to make an honest living. Neither discipline without brutality or cruelty, nor regular training of prisoners, is possible under the barbarous Southern system.